I’ve had the Samsung Galaxy S7 for just about three months. During that time, it’s not only supplanted my Windows Phones, but also an iPhone 6. It’s that good, but also unexpected, for me.

I haven’t exactly been a Samsung fanboy or even proponent to date. I’ve always thought the hardware designs uninspiring, physical quality lacking, and the TouchWiz (what a name) software glaze amateur. That perspective is why I’ve not owned a Samsung device, aside from the very first Windows Phone 7, the Samsung Focus. All my Android devices have been some early devices from HTC (remember the One M7?) or Nexus devices from the likes of LG and Huawei.

Form Factor

Ironically, it was the iPhone 6 that led to me to the Galaxy S7. After years of using pants pocket-busting devices, including the Lumia 1520, 950XL and the Nexus 6P, the iPhone 6 form factor was a breath of fresh air. My hands are relatively small; the 5.7″+ devices were largely 2-handed affairs. Always a delicate balancing act, I just wanted a phone I could hold securely. The iPhone 6 fit the bill.

I used the iPhone on and off, interspersed with Windows Phones and the Nexus 6P for much of the past 6 months. When the GS7 was released, I was intrigued. On first impressions, the step between the GS6 and the GS7 isn’t significant. Both are metal sandwiches, bounded by glass, with a 5.1″ QHD display. However, in comparison to the iPhone 6, with its 4.7″ display, the footprint is only marginally larger: 142.4 x 69.6mm versus 138.1 x 67mm, while fitting in a 0.4″ larger display, with nearly 4 times the resolution.

But, it isn’t just the footprint that’s important. The iPhone is a smooth bar, with no sharp edges. Swiping across the slightly curved display (at the edge) and fingers curling around the back and sides make it feel smaller than it actually is. Contrast that with the Nexus where a flat slab of glass and sharp edges makes it feel every bit its 5.7″ size. The GS7 is a close relative of the iPhone 6 design. The front glass tapers towards the edges, flowing into the metal frame around the phone. The rear glass panel curves, providing a surer grip. In-hand, the GS7 feels similar to the iPhone, although there is more of a perceptible transition between glass and metal. Perhaps the GS8 will address that.

Things feel sturdy enough. Construction quality is great, weight and density lend an aura of quality, and the glass back’s penchant for picking up too many fingerprints and hand-grease ends up helping with grip, particularly compared to the slippery-as-a-bar-of-soap iPhone 6/S. On the downside, unless it was just plucked out of my jean’s pocket, the fingerprint-riddled back is bit gnarly to look at.

Unfortunately, after a few of months of use, the rear glass has picked up a number of rubs/scratches around the corners. I don’t drag it on tables, spin it around or jingle it with keys in my pockets, so that’s disappointing. Get a case, if you really care about maintaining its pristine condition.

On the plus side, the GS7 is rated IP68 without any port covers (impressive), which means an Ingress Protection level of “dust-tight” and complete immersion in water. For water immersion, Samsung specifies this means 5 feet of water for up to 30 minutes. Combined, this means the GS7 should survive considtions from a gusty sand dune in Death Valley all the way to an accidental plunge into a freshwater lake. It’s a nice peace of mind, for an expensive gadget.

Display

The display is a 5.1″ 2560×1440 (Quad HD – QHD) Super AMOLED panel. It’s covered with slightly curved Gorilla Glass 4 and generally looks good. It also performs well in sunlight, with the lower-reflectivity AMOLED panel shining through nicely.

By default, colors are oversaturated and vibrant. Samsung provides a Display option to change this. You can choose a setting called “Basic”, which does a much better job of mimicking an LCD panel’s color profile, but then what is the fun of having an AMOLED display and its crazy qualities? I have the phone set to AMOLED Photo, which is a reasonable middle-ground Basic and the full-fat default mode.

Aside from that, there’s not much else to say. The sub-pixel structure is still Pentile, I believe, but at these resolutions, it really doesn’t matter. You’ll not see any color fringing, much less the pixel structure itself. The panel itself is mounted very close to the surface glass (love the display stack-up afforded by AMOLED panels), so there’s little-to-no parallax when looking and poking at the display.

Battery and Charging

The GS7 comes with an integrated 3000mAh battery. It throws together a dichotomy of microUSB and Qi for fast charging. I’m sure no one at Samsung liked the idea of including microUSB on a flagship 2016 device, but I suspect that had much to do with compatibility with the existing Gear VR headset, which supports only microUSB. It also supports Qualcomm’s QuickCharge 2.0 protocol, and in practice, charges just over 1% per minute until close to full.

Marshmallow includes a number of features to improve battery life, mitigate runaway apps, and quiesce the system when it doesn’t appear to be in use. Despite this, battery life is still quite variable. Some apps just suck the life out of the phone (Outlook, Snapchat). After monitoring the battery usage charts for a couple of weeks, I’ve weeded out the culprits, and now I get (typically) very good battery life. I get through a day of use, with typical 2-2.5 hours of screen on time and heavy background email sync, now using the built-in client. In a typical off-charger at 8am through 11pm day, I end with 33-40% battery left. The wireless chargers I have sprinkled around my work and home make battery life even less of a concern.

Software

TouchWiz (is that really short for Wizard?) is apparently toned down with the GS7 generation. Awesome, because I don’t even want to imagine what it was like to use before. Things are “flat”, which perhaps translates from the Material design language that Google is using throughout its properties. However, Samsung has made unnecessary changes to the core Android experiences, such as changing the settings page and notifications shade, as well as including numerous redundant apps, such as email, phone, contacts, messaging, clock (really?), calculator (really x 2??) and gallery. And because some apps are “Nexus-only”, such as Contacts and Phone, you can’t easily get to a better stock experience. Absolute rubbish.

I’m dredging my mind for positive things to say about the software additions, but they’re hard to come by. Even the icons Samsung uses are a weird approximation of what iOS used 2-3 generations ago, but more cartoon-y.

I ended up purchasing the “pro” version of the Nova Launcher and the Elta icon pack, so I could theme away as much of the TouchWiz experience as possible. It’s what you see in the photos, here. (Also, I’ve since purchased the Toca UI icon pack, which feels even better.)

Camera

Samsung went back to a 12MP sensor (from 16MP in the GS6), while maintaining the same sensor size. It also kept the optical image stabilization capability while growing the aperture by approximately 1/3 stop. The pixel size plus aperture growth should mean, shutter speed and ISO equal, the GS7 can capture around 2x the light as the GS6, at their respective maximum apertures.

The second huge improvement of the GS7 module is its PDAF capability. Samsung coins the sensor a “Dual Pixel” one. It means there’s both a light-capturing sensor as well as a phase-detect sensor in each pixel. The result is autofocus performance (both speed and accuracy) approaching that of a DSLR.

And, to further reduce pocket-to-capture latency, you can double tap the home button to launch the camera app. It works well, the camera module initializes quickly, and the app is ready to go. I’ve definitely captured moments I’d have otherwise missed.

It also helps that image quality is fantastic.

Performance

The GS7 is equipped with a high-end SoC, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, and at least 32GB UFS storage. In North America, the SoC is a Qualcomm MSM8996 (Snapdragon 820 series, in marketing-speak); across many other markets, Samsung uses their home-grown Exynos 8890, which has twice the CPU cores and a Mali GPU, but otherwise similar CPU and GPU performance.

I don’t play games, so I can only comment on day-to-day productivity and system responsiveness. Both are fine, although there are occasions where the phone stutters, piles up a series of inputs, then finally catches up, to my dismay, as now-random touch inputs or buttons issue in short order. I’m not sure if it’s Samsung’s TouchWiz customizations mucking things up; however, by comparison, the Nexus 6P on the average feels more responsive, despite the generation-older SoC (Snapdragon 810). It’s not bad, per se, but clearly not as good as it could be, considering the silicon that powers the device.

Extras

Everything above already makes up a solid smartphone. But, this is Samsung, so there are extras:

Fingerprint Reader – It’s built into the home button. When it works, it works extremely quickly. However, it’s not as accurate as the TouchID I’ve used on my iPhone 6 or iPad Mini 4. It’s occasionally so inaccurate that, along with Microsoft’s Exchange device management policy to wipe the device after 5 failed login attempts, I worry I’ll accidentally reset my phone. (update: this happened once)

Always On Display – The GS7 also supports an “always-on” display mode, where a bit of device information along with date-time can be displayed, even when the phone is in standby. It takes advantage of the AMOLED panel to only illuminate the necessary pixels, so it should consume less power than a typical backlit LCD. It’s been hit or miss, for me. The always on data is useful, I like to know what time it is, but it also seems to consume far more than the 1%/hr quoted by Samsung. Those sessions may have simply be correlated with other poor power scenarios.

Samsung Pay – This “extra” might be the one I’m most impressed with. The GS7 supports secure NFC, so supports Android Pay. But that pales in comparison to the magnetic stripe-supporting Samsung Pay feature. Magnetic Secure Transmission uses a similar tokenization service as secure NFC payment services, e.g. Apple Pay and Android Pay, but also works with payment terminals that only have a magnetic stripe reader. It is awesome and reduces the number of cards I put into my wallet. A recent update that adds support for membership cards means I can remove even more!

Gear VR – I purchased the GS7 early enough that I received a Gear VR headset, otherwise $99, for free. It’s a fun gateway drug to VR. 360 videos and photos appears to be the most compelling, ocassional use scenario, for now.

Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy S7 is a truly impressive piece of technology. It’s the first Samsung phone I’ve used that has that special feel about it, made up of just the right materials, formed in just the right way, with just the right feeling of density.

Couple that with an impressive display, pretty good performance, great battery life, and excellent camera and you have a great all-round smartphone.

Not all is perfect; the fingerprint sensor is markedly less accurate than the iPhone, for me, the glass back isn’t very resistant to scratches, and despite some seriously powerful silicon, responsiveness is occasionally poor. Slathered on top are the less-than-tasteful TouchWiz customizations, which I could do without.

That said, there are two simple statements that sum up my feelings about the Samsung Galaxy S7: I’ve not longed to switch back to my iPhone and I’ve also not felt gear-envy for any of the flagship Android phones that have launched since. In a world of relativity, that’s the highest praise I can give.

For several years, I’ve watched low-cost Chromebooks chip away market share in the entry notebook segment and chomp away at the education market. In the Windows PC ecosystem, you could find notebooks within spitting distance of Chromebook costs ($200-300). Though price points were close, the actual devices were not. The notebooks were 15.6″, 6lb, 4hr battery life “portable desktops”. It was the equivalent of cross-selling a cost-reduced pickup truck against an affordable compact sedan.

Very recently, with the help of appropriate SoC platforms and Windows licensing programs, a trickle of ultraportable $199-249 Windows notebooks have come to market, and are being greeted by reasonable sales (5 out of the top 20 Amazon bestselling notebooks are PCs from this category) and good customer feedback (4.3/5 stars for those 5 bestseller models). I hope this encourages the thoughtful design compromises that are needed at this price segment. On a personal note, I like to think I had a role in these coming about; in my last weeks in the Windows PC Ecosystem team, I co-pitched a number of OEMs these SoC-eMMC-ultraportable notebook configurations in the <$250 segment. I recall consternation, from product managers, about the Windows 8.1 experience with these chipsets, 2GB RAM, and limited user storage (typically 32GB eMMC, due to cost pressures). As we’ll talk about later on, the optimizations to Windows 8.1 and efforts around WIM Boot helped make these systems possible.

I’m writing this from the keyboard of the ASUS X205, a faster, lighter, longer-lasting reincarnation of the netbook. It may be the purest form, to-date, of what the modern netbook can be, with its tablet silicon guts, optimized for consumer electronics-like, consumption-oriented usage. Its technical specs bear that out:

2GB DDR3L 1333MHz RAM – 1x64bit bus, 10.6GB/s bandwidth. Compared to LPDDR3, this will have a negative impact on Connected Standby battery life.

32GB eMMC (Hynix) – As the perf benchmarks will show, this is a middle-to-upper tier eMMC 4.5 part, a bit slower in sequential R/W than a typical 2.5″ 5400RPM laptop drive, but easily an order of magnitude faster at <512KB random R/W. That matters a ton for system responsiveness.

Broadcom dual band WiFi (up to 802.11n) – supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, which is fantastic for cramped airwaves in apartments

ELAN touchpad – has nearly identical dimensions to a 16:9 4.7″ display and while not a Precision Touchpad, at least exhibits a bunch of the characteristics – smooth two-finger scrolling, granular pinch-zoom, panning to the Windows 8 All Apps view via vertical scrolling.

Ports – 2xUSB 2.0, microHDMI, microSD slot

Dimensions – 286 x 193.3 x 17.5 mm (WxDxH)

Weight – 980g

First up, here’s what the out of box experience looks like:

You get a simple cardboard box containing the laptop, a charger, manuals and a redemption code for OneDrive storage.

Time from first power-on to having a configured system and Windows user profile was 5 minutes flat.

I hit a bug that prevented me from using a Microsoft Account during profile setup – I’ll have to check up on that.

The ~29GB of formatted storage has 8GB reserved for a recovery partition. To Windows, 17.2GB of free space remains out of the visible 20.8GB OS/data partition. This system uses WIM boot in order to shrink its required OS footprint.

Unfortunately, there are 600MB of Windows Updates pending; after download and installation, free storage space shrinks to 14.9GB.

After installing the client apps of Office 365, I have 13.1GB of free space.

After employing Windows’ function to create a copy of the recovery partition on a USB key, I’m mulling deleting the partition from the eMMC disk.

I’ve used the laptop as my regular couch or counter surfing machine, since I received it in early November. After a few weeks, there are already a few highlights to call out about the hardware:

It is very light and portable. It gets tossed around the condo, from the den to the kitchen counters to the couch to the bed. It’s a great reference/fact checker machine, since it resumes so quickly (thank you, Connected Standby).

What’s Connected Standby? Think of it as the smartphone or tablet-like responsive experience; your data is always up to date and system resume times are nearly instantaneous, shorter than the time it takes to open the lid to viewing position. That’s simply fabulous.

Quality of materials is good. Under normal typing pressure, the keyboard deck remains firm, wrist-rests don’t flex. There is some flex in the display lid, if you push on the back. There’s a bit of creaking, when picking it up from a corner, with the lid opened, which is the position of maximum leverage one can put on the device.

Battery life (active and standby) is stellar. I’m seeing 11.5-13 hours of real-world light usage battery life and 350-400 hours of Connected Standby (15 days). When I open the laptop and see 10% battery life left, I know I still have an hour (!) of use left.

Performance is sufficient, for consumption-oriented scenarios. I typically run IE with 6-8 tabs open, an Office app, and a couple Modern apps (Mail and Finance are regulars). There is no issue multitasking between them. Responsiveness is particularly high, compared to typical PCs in the price segment, given the order of magnitude advantage in random disk I/O performance.

Thermals are under control. With my workload, I’ve not felt any part of the device get warm, much less hot. There are no fans. Silence is golden.

The display is not a deal breaker, but it’s just a simple TN panel, and color-shift is evident at any viewing angle other than perpendicular. More annoyingly, due to the particularly narrow vertical viewing angles, common to TN, there is color shift across the vertical axis of the display, as the your viewing angle of incident varies down the display.

Physical input is nicely sized (particularly the touchpad), and again is functionally better than many larger, cheap laptops. In particular, the touchpad, for which we impressed importance time and time again with OEMs, actually does not suck.

The AC power adapter is a single cord segment type, providing 1.75A @ 19V (33W). The wall-wart does not have foldable prongs.

This isn’t a mobile powerhouse, nor is it a premium device, hewn from premium materials. However, for $179-199, there are a bunch of areas it exceeds expectations.

Input (keyboard and touchpad) quality

Weight-footprint-portability

Real world battery life

Responsiveness

Design and build quality

Don’t purchase this as a cheap replacement for the family desktop from 5 years ago. This will be slower, overall. Do purchase this, if you have tablet-like use cases and want tablet-like battery life and responsiveness, but think you need to buy a keyboard case, to make that tablet truly useful.

Another popular Windows option in this segment is the new HP Stream 11 (also $199). I mainly couldn’t accept the colour options, but you should get very similar performance with that PC. Trade off the free year of Office 365 Personal, 1TB OneDrive, and larger keyboard (Stream 11) against Connected Standby responsiveness, battery life, and portability of a smaller and 0.5lb lighter laptop (X205).

The rise of the smartphone has been meteoric, and while many have been designed and priced in the image of the aspirational iPhone, sold in developed markets, it’s the entry price segments, in developing markets, that have powered the vast majority of expansion in the past couple years.

Windows Phone has faced massive adoption challenges, but one area where it has seen some success is in the entry segment, sub-$150 devices, often sold in developing markets or other markets where subsidies are not a major part of the telecom ecosystem. Take a look at the Lumia 520, a ~150USD open market device. It holds approximately 1/3 of the entire Windows Phone market. And that’s not simply in emerging markets; in significant parts of the EU and the United States, the same holds true.

Lumia 635

For Windows Phone 8.1, Nokia is in the midst of refreshing its series of phones, and appropriately, they’ve started with the entry segment. The Lumia 635 is one of the lowest cost LTE devices on the market (189USD open market) and its triplet siblings, the 630 and 630 dual SIM, are even lower in price, trading off LTE support for a lower price point. In North America, the Lumia 630/635 has shown up on a number of carriers at very reasonable price points. Having a soft spot for cheap and cheerful smartphones and wanting to see how things were in the budget Windows Phone world, I purchased one. They’re $99 and 129 at the Microsoft Store, no-contract, on AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively. I got the T-Mobile version. Here are some thoughts on how things are looking for the future of smartphones.

I currently use a Lumia 1520 as my primary device. There have been many times where I wished for a smaller phone. The Lumia 635 has a 4.5″ display, with okay bezel sizes, wrapped in a polycarbonate casing. From a dimensions perspective, it doesn’t stand out either positively or negatively. Reaching to the corners of the display, with a single hand, isn’t a problem. The corners are rounded and the sides taper, so in-hand, it’s comfortable. It slips into pockets without any issue. Physical buttons are arrayed on the right-hand side, per usual for Lumias. Missing, from the usual complement, is a dedicated camera button.

The back cover, on the T-Mobile version, is a pleasant matte white. The shape and design are unassuming, but in person, look clean and simple. And, if you want a dash of boldness, you can buy colored covers (I’ve seen yellow, green, and orange). Even better, as the casing wraps around the edges and front of the phone, you could do quite a lot of damage to and then easily refresh it. The covers are priced reasonably – $15 each. The cover is a bit challenging to remove, until you get the hang of it, after a few tries. The benefit is a tight fit, with no creaking nor flexing. The replaceable battery, microSIM and microSD slots are hidden beneath the cover; in all cases, the battery must be removed to swap SIMs or microSD.

Compared to another budget phone I’m familiar with, the Moto G, the in-hand feel is a trade-off – the G has a better form-fitting shape, but the materials feel cheaper (smoother and slipperier).

The display is adequate for the price, with an 854×480 resolution. The additional vertical pixels are used for on-screen soft-keys, a first for Windows Phones, but part of a strategic bet to close the gap with Android phone hardware requirements. Gorilla Glass 3 protects the display, and Nokia’s ClearBlack technology helps reduce reflections and increase contrast. It’s not hard to see some pixelation at normal viewing distances, but in typical use, the UI elements are not filled with so much fine detail to expose the issue, and forgivable at its price point. More challenged is the display’s ability to render text on a full website, zoomed out (or otherwise fine text and details). You really can’t read it, without zooming in. The 720p display of the Moto G would obviously be preferred, but I suspect we’ll soon see something in the Moto G LTE’s price range with a similar display from Windows Phones.

There is no front camera (unfortunate for selfi-ers and those who want to use Skype) and the rear 5MP is nothing to write home about. It takes adequate photos in good lighting, and quickly falls off after that. Nokia’s excellent camera app is still preinstalled, so you can tweak and tune every setting as you could on a higher-end PureView device. Take a look at the result.

Capabilities and Experience

I won’t ramble too much on the rest. The software experience and feature set is as you’d expect to find on most Windows Phones, with a few things to note:

It ships out of the box with Windows Phone 8.1 and the Lumia Cyan feature pack from Nokia (Microsoft)

Given it’s a Lumia, it comes with a number of useful inbox apps, including Here Drive+, providing free offline navigation in many countries

It includes a trio of soft-keys for Back, Windows Home, and Search

However, the nifty capability to show/hide them on the Windows Phone HTC One is missing here. Hopefully this changes in future 8.1 updates.

While I’m traveling internationally (such as right now, to Canada), calls and texts back to the United States are free on WiFi – nice

It has 8GB of internal storage, expandable via a microSD card, and 512MB RAM

Approximately 3.3GB are used for system files and another ~500MB are taken up by inbox apps

The device starts with ~3.5GB of free space on the internal storage

I can live with almost all these trade-offs, to get to this price point (adaptive display brightness, supported by an ALS, is greatly missed). However, the single most significant factor contributing to its budget-phone experience is the inclusion of 512MB RAM. There are a number of apps in the Windows Store (particularly in the games category) for which 512MB RAM does not meet minimum requirements, and hence cannot be installed on the 635. I don’t play any serious games on my phone, so that means little to me.

The more impactful, day-to-day, symptom is the number of “Resuming…” messages you’ll see, as you multitask across apps. With 512MB RAM (versus 1GB+ on the higher end Windows Phones), fewer apps can be kept in the backstack, warm in memory, before critical limits are hit and app contents needs to be ejected. This means a rehydration is needed, when you go back to that particular app. The app platform and apps themselves have done a pretty good job of maintaining state, even across rehydrations, but it still results in an extra second or two to load most apps. Many of the inbox experiences are, thankfully, relatively resource friendly, and launch quickly.

Summary

In a vacuum, there are a few compromises I would not have made, 512MB RAM, lack of an ALS, but hitting a ~$170 transfer price for an LTE phone, in North America, is non-trivial. Even more so, the $99-129 end-user price on pre-paid service is nearly irresistible. It’s a well-built, well-featured, simply designed phone that delivers all the smartphone a basic user needs. It’ll look fresher, while offering similar or better capabilities than the equivalently priced Android prepaid phone around most carrier stores. It definitely meets the bar of a cheap-and-cheerful, tossable phone, and should do well, both on prepaid service in developed markets, while providing a quality option for developing markets, moving towards LTE deployments.

Good

Looks simple and sleek, feels nice to hold

In-app experiences are smooth and fluid

SensorCore support provides a free and accurate pedometer (amongst other capabilities)

8GB internal storage will be enough for many, and good support for microSD expansion makes it a complete non-issue

One of the better (best?) combinations of form factor, build quality, performance, feature set and LTE support for the price

Bad

Not an ideal choice for heavy multitaskers with 512MB RAM and “Resuming…” pauses

It’s been a very long time coming, but it appears that Windows-based products are finally coming within striking range of Chrome and Android-powered devices across the spectrum, from phones to tablets to notebooks. Particularly in phones and small tablets, Android sales have exploded (obviously), while, at the same time, encroaching into the heart of the value notebook segment, with value-priced Chromebooks.

A week ago, while perusing the Laptop Best Sellers list at Amazon, I noticed an influx of Bay Trail-M powered 15.6″ notebooks in the $249 segment. A bit more digging showed that multiple 8″ tablets were also being offered at the ~$200 price point. What’ll be interesting is to see what price point the Toshiba Encore 7″ will reach, given it’s a doppelganger for the $109 Android version (Toshiba Excite Go). On the smartphone front, the Lumia 520/521, the first Windows Phone to be somewhat successful (in terms of sales volume), continues to sit in the top 3 Amazon pre-paid phone best sellers. Soon, it’ll be followed by the price-wise competitive (in developed markets) 530 and 630/635 devices.

It isn’t a homerun by any means. There are still cheaper or better spec’d Android and Chrome devices everywhere you look, but these Windows devices are now at least in the realm of consideration, as it pertains to the price segments a significant portion of the market does their business in. I will also admit to having some pride in helping this become reality, with work on various OS SKUs and Bay Trail-Entry (the SoC that powers the Toshiba Encore 2 lineup).

$220-250 notebooks (apparently popular enough that many go in and out of stock at various retailers)